ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR 215 



ings of an organismal registration in which ideas have not 

 been involved ? 



In her admirable book on The Animal Mind, Miss Wash- 

 burn points out that images of a Hampton Court maze are 

 difficult, and that the slow learning and the nature of the 

 mistakes do not suggest working with ideas. Similarly, in 

 regard to puzzle-boxes, she says that the slow learning, by 

 gradual elimination of useless movements, suggests the ab- 

 sence of any guiding idea of the action, and Professor Thorn- 

 dike, who initiated these experiments, corroborates this view 

 by pointing to the entire lack of inferential or reflective 

 imitation. That is to say, the successful behaviour of com- 

 panions does not seem to be suggestive. But other observers, 

 such as Professor Hobhouse, have come to the opposite conclu- 

 sion, and in any case, as has been well said, '' We cannot 

 conclude that an animal is incapable of ideas because it does 

 not have them suggested to it under circumstances that would 

 suggest them to our minds.'' 



§ 11. Secondary Simplifications of Behaviour. 



The difficulty of understanding animal behaviour is in- 

 creased by the occurrence of secondary simplification. We 

 are familiar with this in the individual habituation of ex- 

 ercises which originally required attentive selection and 

 detailed control. What required conscious regulation from 

 step to step becomes ^ automatic ', requiring very little atten- 

 tion, and the objective side of this is believed to be the es- 

 tablishment of nerve-paths of least resistance, of linkages 

 such that one phase of the behaviour automatically evokes 

 the next. One of the features is the dropping out of what 

 is called implicit behaviour, a common name for the move- 

 ments, too slight for detection, which seem at first to inter- 



